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Pete stalks down the long hallway to the dungeon, tightly surrounded by men he used to call his comrades. The occasional lightbulb hanging bare from the ceiling throws their shadows into stark, fluid shapes on the stained concrete walls.
Pete is furious, and anxious, and terrified. He puts all of his energy into taking steady breaths and measured steps. If they're going to get themselves out of this, Pete is going to need to keep his wits about him.
Pete was gone for barely any time at all. Just three days. And now Vegas is on trial for his life.
They’d seen it coming, sort of. Vegas's most troublesome contacts had been making moves for a while, moves that neither Vegas nor Pete had been able to come up with satisfactory explanations for. The Xia family in particular had been brazenly pushing for undeserved territory expansion. Vegas doesn’t have the same power and backing to draw from as he used to, and so pacifying them without giving in had become increasingly difficult. But even then, the posturing had seemed — too excessive. Combined with other power shifts happening amongst the lower clans, Pete was sure someone was waiting to ensnare them in some sort of carefully-laid trap.
And then Pete’s grandmother fell ill, and Vegas told Pete to go. He had things under control, he’d said. He’d be just fine. And Pete — naive, dumb Pete — had left him behind.
Now half of the Xias are dead, and all of the evidence for the massacre has been neatly packaged and lobbed right into Vegas’s lap.
Pete waits as one of the men radios for access to the doorway at the end of the hallway. His mind is racing. It had taken half a day for Khun Korn to grant him visiting rights, which was half a day too long. Pete is distressingly unsure what Khun Korn’s angle is in all of this. He graciously saved Vegas from being torn apart by the remaining Xias, but also promised the Xias extra men to help hold Vegas captive, until Vegas could answer for his crimes before a jury of the mafia elite. And given the delay in getting any sort of useful information to Pete, Khun Korn doesn’t seem all that inclined to help Vegas out of this mess.
The door opens. With his heart in his throat, Pete allows himself to be led down the row of cells, only to stop short halfway. Distantly, he registers the guards fanning out behind him in a semicircle, ready to catalog his every word and move. But his focus is fully on the dark figure splayed on the floor behind the bars.
“Vegas,” Pete whispers.
The lighting in the cell leaves a lot to be desired, but Vegas looks… not dead. And not anything approaching dead, at least. Vegas’s face is sickly colored from the array of bruises he’s sporting, and his clothes are dirty and disheveled. But he seems to be breathing regularly, is sitting upright — hands pulled tightly behind him, presumably cuffed — and as he makes eye contact with Pete, he tilts his head back against the stone wall, cracks a grin, blood seeping from between his teeth.
“Baby,” he rasps.
Pete shivers at that, moves almost unconsciously to clutch at the bars, drawn in by the sound of his voice.
Vegas laughs, hoarsely. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
Pete grips the bars tighter. “Vegas,” he says, then pauses.
“How’s Yaai doing?” Vegas says. “Feeling better?”
Pete breathes in sharply. “Vegas,” he says again, a little harshly. “You need to tell me what happened.”
Vegas gives him a long, unreadable look, before glancing behind Pete and then back. “There isn’t much to say. Xia Tian is dead. So are all of his children. Apparently, I killed them.”
So they can’t speak freely. And if Vegas thinks they can’t speak freely, then Vegas has information — crucial information that Pete needs. “It wasn’t you,” Pete says anyway.
“It wasn’t me,” Vegas agrees.
Pete’s eyes dart around the cell, landing on Vegas more often than not. They need to talk without risk of being overheard. Maybe Pete can convince one of the men to let him into the cell to check on Vegas — no, there’s no way, Vegas doesn’t seem to have sustained enough damage to warrant it-
“Pete,” Vegas says, eyes gone hooded and dark, “You know I love you, yeah?”
Vegas shouldn’t have said that. Pete feels his nose go sour, eyes prickling at the corners. “Don’t say it like that,” he spits out, “don’t say it like you’re about to die-”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Vegas says, shifting slightly to straighten up further. “I just want you to know. And I want to survive this,” his voice turns steely, “I’m going to clear my name.”
Before Pete can respond, Vegas suddenly wrenches his hands apart from behind his back, scrambles up to rush at the bars, reaches his hands through to clasp both sides of Pete’s face. “Please kiss me,” he breathes out — completely unnecessarily, as he pulls Pete closer to the bars and smashes Pete’s mouth into his.
Pete feels a rush of heat shoot down his spine, letting out an involuntary moan at the taste of Vegas’s blood as Vegas licks his mouth open, pressing closer to the bars as he lets Vegas nip harshly at his bottom lip, lets Vegas run his hands through Pete’s hair and down Pete’s neck and thumb against Pete’s pulse point-
Pete abruptly becomes aware of the yelling in the background as the guards wrench him away from the bars and from Vegas. At least two guards are holding him back — not that they have to try that hard, Pete doesn’t think it would be very smart of him to resist. Three more men move to open the cell and wrestle Vegas back into his restraints, which Pete now sees were actually lengths of rope. Despite everything, Pete lets the corners of his mouth quirk up. Nobody knows their way around a rope better than Vegas.
“The trial is in two days,” Pete says loudly, as the men behind him swear and start to drag him towards the door. “I’ll see you then, okay?”
Vegas turns his head slightly from where he’s being pressed face-down into the floor, spares him a small smile and what might be a wink.
Once the door thuds shut behind them, Pete shoulders his way out of the hold the guards have on him, dusts his hands against the sides of his thighs before setting off down the hallway unprompted. He wills his heart rate to go down, affects a stoic expression as the guards move to flank him again.
He very carefully doesn’t move to adjust his shirt in any way. The shirt is Vegas’s, hastily thrown on and haphazardly tucked in as Pete rushed to get here, and is currently housing what Pete thinks is a USB stick — or whatever Vegas slipped down the back of his shirt as he palmed at Pete’s neck.
Pete pokes his tongue out, slowly licks at the side of his mouth to get at the blood Vegas smeared onto him, pulls his lip in to suck at the throbbing bite mark Vegas left behind. The metallic tang grounds him, sharpens his resolve.
It had felt like his chest was caving in, when they hauled him away from Vegas. But it's going to be okay.
Pete is going to walk out of here uninterrupted, without raising a single red flag. Then he’s going to use the information that Vegas probably risked his life for, that Vegas so cleverly handed off to him, that Vegas trusts him to use correctly. And then he’s going to hunt down the men pulling the strings in the shadows — the scum responsible for framing the man he loves — and he’s going to raze them to the ground.